


On the Origin of Angels

by Daylight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels, Gen, Mythology - Freeform, Religion, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-07
Updated: 2010-10-07
Packaged: 2017-10-12 12:25:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/124790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daylight/pseuds/Daylight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four possible explanations for what angels are and where they come from.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Origin of Angels

I. Fire

Angels are light.

When God separated the light from the darkness, he carved off a portion of the light and set it aside. From this, he moulded his angels. He made them in his image just as he would make man, but to them, he added wings for it was his intent that they should act as his messengers between heaven and earth. Each feather was carefully crafted, each barb and rachis made of slivers of light, so when their wings unfurled, the angels would be able to catch not air but energy and ride the threads that held the very universe together.

For light is purity and power.

For light is God's glory.

But as God knew the spectrum of light is separated into many colours in an infinite amount of shades. Each one is different, and therefore, so are the angels.

Lucifer is ultraviolet, always too harsh, too bright and too beautiful.

Michael is cold blue, true, pure and unfeeling.

Raphael is deep crimson, swirling strength, passion and rage.

Gabriel is bright yellow-orange, lively, joyous and playful.

And little Castiel is calm green-blue, truthful and loyal, young but growing.

Together, the angels make up the white light of heaven, but as each one falls, the light grows a little darker.

 

II. Water

The angels came from another world, a giant gaseous planet where turquoise and aquamarine storms forever swirled across the surface. They were beings of energy and they swam through these storms almost mindlessly, content to simply exist and dance among the currents of hydrogen and helium.

Then another being came to their planet. A wise and powerful immortal who coaxed them to the surface and taught them to think, taught them to believe, taught them to obey.

He became their god and they called him father.

Eventually, the immortal grew bored with their planet and turned his attention to another. A place called Earth. There he found beings called humans who intrigued him and pleased him.

He left the turquoise planet, but he brought the beings of energy with him. He gave them feathered wings and taught them how to swim through the Earth's heavy atmosphere.

But these beings, who had become angels, could not exist long on the planet. It was not made for them, not like their turquoise home. They were forced to borrow the bodies of humans in order to walk on the new thing they learned to call ground.

So the immortal set them up a new home, another dimension that existed both above and between Earth, a place he named Heaven, and he commanded them to watch over the humans, to send them his messages, to love and worship them.

Some of the angels didn't understand. They remembered the lessons to worship only their father and they grew confused and then angry, while others remembered the lessons to obey and so they followed their father's wishes despite the contradictions.

The two sides fought.

One side won.

The ones who lost were cast out and told to make their existence in another dimension, a place both below and between Earth, a place they called Hell.

And so they became the angels of Heaven and the fallen of Hell.

They don't remember their home planet anymore, not really. If they dreamt, they would dream about it, but they don't. Instead, they see flashes of blue behind borrowed eyelids.

And sometimes when they stand at the edge of a rocky cliff looking down at a raging, blue-green sea, they suddenly find themselves longing for home.

 

III. Earth

Despite what we've been led to believe, angels are very ugly creatures.

They evolved first before humans, a missing link between dinosaurs and birds walking and flying over a primordial earth.

In their true forms, they are colourless, gray creatures with rough, uneven scales covering their bodies like dry desert rocks. Their thin, bony limbs are long and twisted, their spines bent. They have wings, but the feathers are sharp and crooked, and when they walk, the wings drag behind them in the dirt.

But these creatures learned magic.

Magic of blood and bone and earth.

With this magic, they cloaked their ugliness, but they did much more as well. They learned spells for hunting and tracking, for reading minds and healing wounds, for foretelling the future and travelling through time.

The more they learned the more unsatisfied they became with their earthbound existence. Their goal became to ascend from the dirt and the blood to a higher plane of existence, one that was far away from their misshapen, mortal bodies.

Finally, one was able to accomplish this and he became the most powerful. He set himself up as their leader and later their god, teaching the others how to ascend like he had, but keeping some tricks to himself.

And so they rose up to the heavens leaving their bodies, looking back on them only with disgust and contempt. Even now that thousands of years have passed, the memories of their former lives have faded, and another race dominates the Earth, the angels still see flesh as repulsive and loath the fact they have to borrow it from humans in order to walk on the ground once more.

But though they left their old bodies behind long ago, when they swiftly dart from one edge of the world to the other, you can still hear the echo of their feathered wings.

 

IV. Air

Angels have no substance. Some might say they don't even really exist, though you may still find one standing right in front of you.

They are not made of matter or even energy.

Only thought.

What people perceive to be angels are only illusions produced in their heads, their neurons firing in reaction to nothing as the angels weave their way inside their brains. They have no form of their own and only see the world in terms of the thoughts of others moving from one mind to the next, taking over a mind completely and using its body as a vessel when they need to act on the world directly.

At first, people could only conceive of them as a reflection of themselves and they assumed the angels were like man.

And so they became men.

Then the people saw how the angels travelled between Heaven and Earth delivering God's messages and they pictured them with the giant, feathered wings of birds.

And so they grew wings.

Then the people saw how the angels used their powers to wreak God's vengeance across the Earth and they saw them as warriors with six wings and four heads.

And so they became beasts too terrible for the people to behold.

For angels are merely aspects of the will of God, his fingerprints in the minds of those he'd created, but though they started out that way, made of nothing but thought, thoughts become ideas and ideas grow.

And so the angels grew. Defined by God's will and man's belief, they began developing wills of their own and it no longer mattered what people believed them to be. They now had their own beliefs.

But with this freedom came consequences. After eons of following orders, the angels began to think for themselves. They began to question.

Lucifer was the first.

After his rebellion, God decided that the angels were best left to govern themselves.

Suddenly, the angels found themselves with no orders and the chaotic minds of countless humans to oversee. They were forced to start making decisions, to act of their own volition, and they longed for the simpleness of before, free from the disorganization of independent thought. So their first decision became to create order on Earth in the only way they knew how, by bringing about the apocalypse and clearing the way for their own paradise, a world of control and order in body and mind.

And they would have succeeded too if an angel called Castiel hadn't had a thought of his own that grew from an idea and a question to a decision and an act.


End file.
